CRASH trumps BROKEBACK at the OSCARS

So, the Oscars are done and dusted and as usual we have some well-deserved awards (Philip Seymour Hoffman for CAPOTE) and some errors (Rachel Weisz for THE CONSTANT GARDENER over Amy Adams in JUNEBUG; George Clooney in SYRIANA over William Hurt for A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE; Tsotsi beating SOPHIE SCHOLL for Best Foreign Film). KING KONG cleaned up all the special effects awards and MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA got anything to do with costume, sets and cinematography. I called all the acting awards correctly as well as the Script, Director and most of the technical categories. On "red at roulette" rules, if I had staked a tenner on each prediction, I would have staked £210 and won back £240, so a small, but not oracle-like, success. The only really big upset was that BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN was beaten by CRASH for BEST FILM. But really, I can't get too excited about a set of awards that effectively barred the two best films of the year: HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and HIDDEN; and the best docs., GRIZZLY MAN and MAD HOT BALLROOM. Here is the full list of winners, with the ones I thought would win marked with an asterisk. The full list of nominations can be found here.

BEST FILM: CRASH. BEST DIRECTOR: Ang Lee for BROKEBACK*. BEST ACTOR: Philip Seymour Hoffman for CAPOTE*. BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: George Clooney for SYRIANA*. BEST ACTRESS: Reese Witherspoon for WALK THE LINE*. BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Rachel Weisz for THE CONSTANT GARDENER*. BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: WALLACE AND GROMIT*. BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE: MARCH OF THE PENGUINS. BEST FOREIGN FILM: TSOTSI. BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:Dion Beebe for MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. BEST EDITING: Hughes Winborne for CRASH; BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana for BROKEBACK*. BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Paul Haggis and Bobby Moresco for CRASH. BEST COSTUME DESIGN: Colleen Atwood for MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA*. BEST ART/SET DIRECTION: MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. BEST MAKE-UP: MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. BEST SONG: It's hard out here for a pimp from HUSTLE AND FLOW.*.BEST SOUND EDITING: MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. BEST SOUND MIXING: KING KONG*. BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: KING KONG*

LAST HOLIDAY - charming weepie romance flick

LAST HOLIDAY isn't exactly a romantic comedy. At least, there aren't many laugh-out moments. But it is a feel-good romance in the best traditions of the genre. It stars Queen Latifah - an actress who has that rare quality of making you want to spend time with her when she is on screen. She projects a warm and straightforward personality. You want nice things to happen to her. That's exactly what you get in this flick. Queen Latifah plays a hard-working, sensible sales assistant in a department store. When she discovers she has only three weeks to lives, she cashes in her life savings and goes on one final hoorah at a fancy Alpine hotel. While there, she straight talks sleazy businessmen and politicians, earns the love and respect of the hotel staff (not least Gerard Depardieu) and eats some damn fine food! This being a weepy rom-com, I do not think I am spoiling any surprises to say that she gets to live happily ever after with her new boyfriend, played by LL Cool J. Overall, LAST HOLIDAY is clearly not a work of art, but it is awfully sweet and made me shed a tear or two near the end. The operation is carried off by Queen Latifah's charm, and while the opening segment could have been cut by twenty minutes, I really didn't want the movie to end. Aw, shucks!

LAST HOLIDAY is on release in the US and UK.

SYRIANA - pretentious, yawn-inducing and inaccurate

SYRIANA is an over-hyped alleged thriller that attempts to explore the politics of the oil business. Featuring a star-studded cast, and the kind of lush photography that you get in advertising, here is a movie that repackages politics for the HBO generation, and fails miserably. While the movie looks great and the acting performances are all fine, the real faults lie in the conception of the movie and the script by Stephen Gaghan. Gaghan is the man behind the infinitely better flick, TRAFFIC. Like TRAFFIC, SYRIANA has a script that inter-cuts three plot strands that are loosely related. This has led some critics to claim that the movie is complex and hard to understand. Actually I had no problem following the story here. Incomprehension was not my problem.

The first major problem is that the movie tells us nothing that we did not already know about US politics, the Middle East or big business. There are no flash-bulb moments, and in many ways, the issues here are "dumbed-down". I found it a really fantastically facile, trite script by someone who clearly has very little cultural or political feel for the material he is addressing. If you want an expose of US politics, check out John Sayles' SILVER CITY. If you want insight on the Middle East go read some history. If you want to see how "everything is connected" - the platitudionous tagline to the film - go see CRASH.

The second major problem is that the movie is just plain yawn-inducing. I LOVE cinema; I love Middle Eastern politics; I love Clooney, Damon and Cooper; but even I could barely keep my eyes open. I do not ask that movies educate me - although when they claim they are going to it is nice if they live up to that promise - but I do ask that they entertain me. I want my intellectual or emotional interest to be piqued. I want laughter, tears, or provocation. SYRIANA did not deliver.

So, now the broad-brush gripes are over, here are some minor geeky gripes. 1. Why do the Pakistani muslim terrorists speak in Hindi? Granted there are Muslims in India but they speak Urdu. And while many Pakistanis do not speak Urdu as a first language, they will most likely speak Pushto or Punjabi instead. It is frickin' ironic that a movie that attempts to get under the skin of Middle Eastern politics, and establish a credible stance on these issues, can mess up on something so basic. I was, frankly, insulted. 1b. What language is George Clooney speaking when in Beirut? He is complemented on his good Arabic, and claims to be speaking Farsi, but the accent is impenetrable and unless this is some dialect, sounds nothing like Farsi. 2. It is absolutely incredible that anyone would address the an Emir in the manner in which Matt Damon addresses the Prince just after the "Marbella incident".

SYRIANA is on limited release in the US, Germany, France, Austria and UK.

MURDERBALL - impressive people; unimpressive film-making

MURDERBALL is a documentary focusing on the US and Canadian wheelchair Rugby teams in the run up to the Athens Paralympic games. It is an examination of life as a quadriplegic and the misconceptions the able bodied have about such people. By focusing on Olympic level sportsmen, the documentary makers show us that quadriplegics are just as, if not more, competitive and successful in their chosen field as the able-bodied. As one athlete says on the eve of the paralympics, "we didn't come here for a hug, we came for the gold medal".

MURDERBALL has attracted a lot of critical acclaim, a large part of which, I believe, is unjustified. The people featured in the documentary are no doubt impressive, but once I had heard the back-story of the players and seem them in action once, I lost interest. Worse still, I felt that the documentary-makers created a false villain in Joe Suares - the ex-US player who defected to become the Canadian coach. Cue lots of absurdly melodramatically edited shots of young players saying to Joe, "how does it feel to betray your country". Moreover, Joe is portrayed as an evil man because he is occasionally short-tempered with his kid. And then, post heart-attack, Joe supposedly is frightened into becoming the perfect parent. I am sure that neither extreme is true. Similarly manipulative is the fact that the documentary makers' goaded Chris Igoe to appear in the film. Chris Igoe was responsible for the drunk-driving incident that put Mark Zupan - the poster-boy of US wheelchair rugby - in a chair in the first place.

I think that when documentaries work it is because they throw us into an aspect of life of which we know relatively little, and carry us away with the story. That is exactly what happened in the wonderful documentary MAD HOT BALLROOM. MURDERBALL struggles to come up with the same intensity and sense of building to a finale - the US/Canada match in the Olympics. Perhaps it is because the DP cannot shoot sports matches for shit - it is a particualr and under-rated skill. Perhaps it is because the film-makers caricatured their participants through editing. Whatever the reason, MURDERBALL held my interest for about 30 minutes and then left me cold. And while it probably is the better of the Oscar nominees, that is not saying much. Both GRIZZLY MAN, and MAD HOT BALLROOM are not on that list, but are far more satisfying on a cinematic and emotional basis.

MURDERBALL premiered at Sundance 2005 where it won the Audience Documentary Award and a Special Jury Prize for the editing. It went on limited cinematic release in the US in summer 2005 and in the UK in November. It is now available on DVD and has been nominated for the Best Doc Oscar.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN - slick, funny, gun-totin' awesomeness

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is not a pantheon movie but it has an awful lot going for it. Those looking for above-average Friday night pop-corn entertainment would do better to see this than the god-awful alleged satire, DATE MOVIE.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN has a fairly convoluted plot, but it is by no means as opaque or incredible as some reviewers would have you believe. Slevin Kalevra is the oddly-named hero of the piece. He comes into New York to stay with his friend Nick Fisher, but finds an empty apartment and a kooky neighbour in the form of Lucy Liu. It turns out that Nick was in hock to two warring underworld chiefs: The Boss and The Rabbi. Each brings him in and asks for a “favour”. These favours are not of the borrowing-a-cup-of-sugar variety: they are of the Don-Corleone variety. The movie then follows Slevin paying off “his” gambling debts with the police and a hitman on his tail.

The first good thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it has a genuinely funny script, with the kind of word-play and love of a quick one-liner that you find in Tarantino movies pre-Kill Bill. As an added bonus, cine-literate viewers will love all the movie and TV references – which flip from Hitchcock to Columbo by way of the Schmoo. The movie is full of the kind of conversation you have with your mates in the pub. First time screenwriter Jason Slimovic is clearly one to watch.

The second really good thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that despite being really very funny, especially in the first half hour, it does then flip into darker territory. It is not afraid to show the good-looking hero do bad things, and despite the re-shot ending, has a more noir-ish feel than the standard Hollywood guns’n’ass fare.

The third super-cool thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it looks awesome. This is not simply because Josh Hartnet spends the first forty minutes in a towel, although I am not complaining about that either. It is because the production designer has taken the heavily patterned wallpaper and kitsch chandeliers from Soho House New York and painted the town with it beyond all sense and taste. If I ruled the world, this is what it would like. Like a seedy seventies nightclub the morning after too much scotch.

The fourth wicked thing about LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is that it is really well acted and for the most part by people playing against type. Josh Hartnett partially redeems himself from the travesty that was PEARL HARBOUR as Slevin. Lucy Liu, hard-assed lawyer in Ally McBeal and gang-land warrior in Kill Bill, plays the charming, ditzy GIRL NEXT DOOR. I loved her in THREE NEEDLES and I this, and wonder she isn’t getting/taking on more work. Morgan Freeman, all-round cool, good guy in countless flicks, plays a vengeful mob boss. And best of all we have SIR Ben Kingsley as opposing mobster, Schlomo. Kingsley morphs together his role as Jewish thief, Fagin, in Polanski’s OLIVER TWIST and Cockney psycho Don Logan in SEXY BEAST. The performance is restrained and absolutely convincing. In one especially devastating scene, where he hears some terrible news, just look at his face. It’s an acting master-class all if its own.

The final awesome thing is that the director, Paul McGuigan, of GANGSTER No. 1 fame, really knows how to make a visual impact. The way in which he uses the camera brings so much style and energy to the screen. Guy Ritchie wishes he were this cool.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN is currently on release in the UK and opens in the US on March 31st. There are no scheduled release dates for Continental Europe.

PAVEE LACKEEN - a slice of life on the margins

PAVEE LACKEEN is a fascinating low-budget film shot on video by a British film-maker called Perry Ogden. The film focuses on the traveller community living on the outskirts of Dublin, and on one ten-year old girl called Winnie in particular. Winnie is one of ten kids living with their mother and their father is absent: the mother has pawned her wedding ring. The girls can't read or write, or even read a clock. They wash their hair under a stand-pipe across the road from the trailer and put on their make-up in a mirror in a lorry because there is no electricity for the lights in the trailer. Having spent the day getting dolled up, Winnie and her sister totter down the road to the chip shop. They sit on the side of the road eating chips. "Boring, isn't it?" one says to the other. They never even make it to the nightclub.At various points we see Winnie being pulled up by teachers, or helped out by a doctor, or potentially being re-housed by a social worker. The depiction of her life is deeply depressing.

The movie is shot in documentary style and makes very little editorial comment about the social issue on which it focuses. Neither does it attempt to impose a neat narrative arc on the film, although throughout the film there is the threat of eviction. Some have found this lack of clear narrative a reason to criticise the film. But for me, the strength of the movie is that Perry Ogden trusts in his material. I found PAVEE LACKEEN to be a fascinating look at people on the edges of our society - a story that needs to be told. It seems to be that the use of non-professional actors and the meandering structure of the film is perfectly suited to this kind of honest material.

PAVEE LACKEEN played at the London Film Fest 2005 where it won the Satyajit Ray award for Best First Feature. It is currently on limited release in the UK.